The New Millennium Remote Agent NMRA will be the rst AI system to control an actual spacecraft. The spacecraft domain places a strong premium on autonomy and requires dynamic recoveries and robust concurrent execution, all in the presence of tight real-time deadlines, changing goals, scarce resource constraints, and a wide variety of possible failures. To achieve this level of execution robustness, we have integrated a procedural executive based on generic procedures with a deductive model-based executive. A procedural executive provides sophisticated control constructs such as loops, parallel activity, locks, and synchronization which are used for robust schedule execution, hierarchical task decomposition, and routine con guration management. A deductive executive provides algorithms for sophisticated state inference and optimal failure recovery planning. The integrated executive enables designers to code knowledge via a combination of procedures and declarative models, yielding a ri...
Barney Pell, Edward B. Gamble, Erann Gat, Ron Kees